What are you reading in Comics/Manga/etc?

Anybody got good graphic novel or tpb recommendations for a brother-in-law whose comics taste I've gathered tend to the "gritty" and Mark Millar-y? I think he's already read the obvious, actually good stuff like Red Son. Wouldn't have to be superhero, in fact I think some other genre would probably be better.

Yea, I thought of Ennis but honestly haven't read enough of his stuff to know a good entry point.  Hellblazer came to mind as probably in his wheelhouse, but I gave up almost instantly on trying to figure out what the right place to start on that would be.  My sister made it sound like he'd like to get into reading more comics but hasn't done too much, so I think anything that wasn't some big breakthrough hit is probably safe.  I'll take a look at Hitman.

EDIT: Holy shit, Hitman must have been out of print for awhile because it is crazy expensive

Transmetropolitan (Ellis/Robertson) remains a favorite of mine. Scifi future politics, satire, and a gun that makes you shit yourself.

I've been reading a bunch of what has quickly become my fav genre, "lesbian romance comedy manga written by women about girls who collectively share one brain cell and are all total trash fires." My fav of that little microverse right now is definitely School Zone (aka School Zone Girls in the US edition), which is a very weird and funny series about a bunch of just complete disasters who are all various degrees of in love with each other.

It's a very breezy, fast-paced read with a ton of characters and some of my favorite facial expressions in manga - the creator, Ningiyau, is so talented at conveying so much visually in her often very short chapters.

Some example panels:

She's just scared of the school's resident ghost, Toilet Mary. It's a totally reasonable fear.

Did you read the follow ups to it: My Solo Exchange Diary 1 + 2?
If you dug My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness they're in the same vein as that and do a good job of kind of capturing the way depression feels.

Drops Of God, Tadashi Agi / Shu Okimoto

One of those "there can be manga about everything", in this case it's about wine tasting. The son of a famous wine critic, who had intentionally never tasted wine just to spite his father, is called back to his dad's house for the reading of his father's will. He and another famous wine critic, who had himself adopted by the first critic in the hopes of inheriting the first critic's impressive wine cellar, have to compete in identifying The Drops Of God, the Twelve Apostles, twelve wines that the first critic thought were pretty good or whatever, and he wrote descriptions of them and after each one his two children have three weeks to figure out the wine, describe it, and see how close their description matches. All three have(/had) the power to, like, go into a trance upon drinking wine and get cinematic cutscene images from one sip, and I guess I've never drunk the right wines? The series started in 2004 so "recent" wines are from the late 90s which is still totally the case, right? The wine bottles are shown in exquisite detail and it kind of makes me want to try some of them.
As dopey as I've made this sound, I've been tearing through the series. I'm a little less than halfway through, and it's currently free on Kindle through Prime. The two-page spreads don't work well on Cloud Reader, but other than that, it's fine.

Power Pack, #1-6 (1984)

Louise Simonson and June Brigman made a thoughtful comic for kids. Nice work. My kids don't seem to care much for it. They're holding 40-year-old comics in their hands; however, they enjoy the ads. So that's something.

The Adventures of Barry Ween, Boy Genius - Monkey Tales (2001)

Was just writing a review in the 'Reply' window when I swiped my thumb across the touchpad and exited out of the tab. Suffice it to say:

Incident Report

I've been going to a comic shop.
I saw this series. I picked it up, hesitantly.
I asked about the series, inquiring and chatting with the comic book guy archetype who runs the joint. (I now have a few anecdotes about Australasian comics I gleaned in our 5 minute chat that'd be of some interest but doesn't serve purpose here)
Initially, I chose not to pick this for purchasing, but after poring through the boxes for another 10 minutes I found nothing my 10 year old might like.

Observed Outcome

There's a lot of swearing in this.
The character reads like an older Stewie Griffin.
I feel that many of the comics with children in them rely on "missing parents" as the vertices of plot and story.
Judd Winick has an excellent graphical style. It's what drew me in to focus on this to buy.
My 10 year old, in whose hands this now stays, will probably hone his "adult in a kid body" attitude he's been working on for about 3 years now.

Judgment:

Winick's portrayal is funny for an adult reading. I have no idea what the kid will get out of it.
I feel like a regretful Kenny Powers for buying this, intending it to be read by a child.
I remember my own access to comics that were far more "dangerous" and still feel uncomfortable.
I will be throwing up my hands and letting the chips fall where they may because there's already a steady torrent of dung that's been put in front of my kids' eyes.

Goodbye, Eri is a one-shot manga about a high school boy who is obsessed with making movies. The first film he makes is a predictably tearjerky documentary about his terminally ill mother. However, at the end he’s unable to join his mother for her final moments and instead runs away, but in his film he adds a special effect to make it look like the hospital is exploding as he flees.

The story begins as he shows his creation at the school festival, where it sinks like a lead balloon. Almost everyone in the school thinks the ending of his film is stupid except for one girl who insists that there was the germ of an interesting idea in there and he just needs to watch more movies to learn what works. Of course, he will be watching the movies with her, since she needs to make sure that his cinematic education proceeds appropriately.



The girl is not manic, but she definitely looks pixie-like and is certainly the kind of film buff a movie nerd would wish for, so almost a full MPDG.

The boy eventually comes up with an idea for his next movie, which will be about a boy who showed a movie about his terminally ill mother which was received poorly by his fellow students, but who then met a girl who constantly watched movies with him and taught him about making a good film. Also the girl is a vampire who’s terminally ill.

Written out like that, the movie sounds earnestly dumb, but it comes across as rather sweet from the perspective that we see, which is entirely from the point of view of the mock documentary that the boy is shooting.

As you can guess, the story plays with ideas of the fourth wall, with unreliable narrators, with constructed images and artifice, and even with death and how the people we’ve lost are still alive and with us anyway. I don’t really want to spoil too much of the story, as it’s best enjoyed without too much foreknowledge, but I do recommend it as being a surprisingly deep exploration of a lot of emotional territory from the guy who wrote a manga about a teenage boy who transforms into a demon made out of chainsaws who uses his powers to hunt other demons (Chainsaw Man, though that manga was also a lot deeper than the bare description would make you think).

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been reading recently.

I’d rate Strange Adventures slightly behind Mr. Miracle and slightly ahead of Vision, so obviously still very very good. DC Black Label should just keep throwing c-listers at King and Gerard for as long as they’re interested in doing these types of books.

It's been a while since I've been there, but I feel like a good quarter of the women I know in Japan have that haircut, and the outfit is kinda typical HS uniform-ish. 

He-Man and the Masters of the Universe: the Complete Newspaper Strips (2017)

I only made it through the first compiled story. This is an amazing aggregation of almost lost art. What engaged my interest was how expressively Skeletor was drawn. How this guy made the antagonist have so many varied frowns and sneers was astonishing.

Quickly viewed while kids were having some bullshit Star Wars storytime library goof with a few people doing publicly accepted Nazi dress-up.

Kent State, Derf Backderf (2020)

Ohio. What is it with your state? Dav Pilkey, Harvey Pekar, Siegel and Schuster. Ya gotta lotta comics and high weirdness flowing through your old networks of canals. For those wondering, ol' Derf managed to go to high school with Jeffrey Dahmer; he wrote and illustrated a book about it. It became a film in 2017. Netflix piled on its glee of ghouls by making an even more lurid series that reaped questions of integrity and well-reasoned ire. He also had contact with the events of Kent State. This anthropology of the areas surrounding and including Kent, OH is engrossing so far. Attention to details of events and copious amounts of research went into making a book that immediately has value as display of how much dissent and unrest were present in the late 60s, early 70s US.